The location of the piano in your home can make a huge difference in your willingness to practice and your playing enjoyment. After all, if you are serious about learning to play the piano, you will spend a lot of time practicing. This means your piano needs to be in an area of the home that promotes relaxation, focus, concentration, physical comfort, and the ability to accurately hear what you are playing. Think of the ideal location as similar to a good place to study or do homework.
For me, my ideal location for my piano would be a beautifully decorated room where I enjoy spending time. The room would have doors that shut, so I am not distracted by other people listening to TV or playing games near me. I would have a window so that I can look outside once in a while and have some artwork on the walls. I would have both an air conditioner and a heater so that I could be comfortable and I would have good lighting so that I can read my music easily.
Unfortunately, we can't often design our homes around having the ideal practice location for our piano and we just have to make the best of what's available in our existing home. My advice is to look over your home and try as best you can to place your piano in a desirable place for piano practice.
MISCELLANEOUS PRACTICE TIPS
There is just no substitute for practice. Everyone has to practice to achieve a better standard of performance. Here's some tips to help you find a way to get the practice you need.
When starting a new piece:
1. Analyze
the piece for structure. Notice repeated
sections. Look for patterns. Know the meanings of all musical terms.
2. Go
through the entire piece slowly with your teacher and figure out fingerings
that will work for you in all tricky areas. Write the fingerings in the music
and don’t change them.
3. Practice
the hardest part first. Since this part
of the piece will take the longest time to learn, it’s logical to start on this
section first so that it will be ready when the rest of the piece is learned.
4. Find ways to simplify a composition when first starting to learn something difficult. Examples include: Singing the
melody (if in the right hand) while playing the left hand harmony to figure out
melodic phrasing, condensing the left hand harmony into chords and
then play the chords with the left hand while playing the right hand melody for
melodic phrasing and recognition of structure, or skipping all the ornaments (ornaments are extra notes that decorate the melody).
Tips for learning
a piece well:
- Start
practicing the piece or a section at the end instead of the beginning.
- Play hands
separately with the metronome at performance tempo, then hands together at a
slower practice tempo.
- Do spot
checks throughout a piece. Start in the
middle of phrases and even in the middle of bars to check for accuracy.
- If
memorizing, make sure you can play the left hand alone by memory in addition to
hands together.
- Play
through your piece once all the way through while making a recording. Immediately play the recording back to
yourself while listening intently for possible areas of improvement. Then practice the piece in small chunks.
- Spend
extra time practicing transitions between sections of the piece.
Specific practice tips for kids and their parents:
- Set a
regular practice time during the week.
It can be before school, after snack, just before dinner, really anytime
as long as it is a regular practice time built into the child’s schedule.
- Make sure
your child doesn’t merely repeat a piece over and over. Although repetition is required to learn a
piece well, mindless repetition will become tiresome and lead to listless
mechanical playing. Effective practicing must involve imagination, listening,
and paying attention to your body. Ask
questions about your children’s piece. What is the story contained within the
music? Is there a tricky part and what strategies are they using to learn the
tricky part? (Ideally there should be multiple strategies.) Are there any patterns in
the piece? How does the piece make you feel?
Why do you like this piece? Etc.
- Show an
interest in your child’s progress and praise your child’s day to day
improvement. Ask to hear any of their pieces or technical work. Find something good to say about their
performance (be honest, but find something about their performance you like).
Specific practice tips for older students and adults:
- Keep a log
of your practice time. When schedules
change day to day, it’s important to figure out if your practice is getting
shortchanged amid other commitments.
Keeping a log will allow you to track how much time is being spent on
practice.
- When learning a new piece, don't try to do everything at once. Build up a piece step by step and little by little so that you are not trying to figure out too many things at the same time. Be patient with yourself.
- Practicing in small increments of time that are available to you can be very effective. Always have some ideas for practice that utilize small amounts of time. Maybe it's practicing just the ending to a piece when you have ten minutes of free time. Then when you have another ten minutes, you can try out a different specific passage that is giving you trouble.
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